CreateSource has been shooting, encoding, and deploying video for the Internet and television for Zarifas.com since mid- 2005. Using only a Sony DCR-SR40, we regularly shoot video of Zarifa’s Community Dance, a monthly belly dance event, and prepare short samples of the event for her web site.

Video is encoded to mpg using the camera’s proprietary software. It is then imported into Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, titling, transitions, compositing, and final output at the required resolution.

The video player shown was developed for Zarifas.com. The Flash player frame and controls are all that initially loads on the page. The Flash player reads in an XML file to gather the list you see of actual videos and captions. When the play button is pressed, the selected video begins to stream. Flash loads the buffer with enough data to continue playing at the current download rate. Once playing, the video continues to load data during play, delivering a faster and painless video experience.

Accessibility and usability is also a major concern in deploying video. We use the open source Javascript library SWFobject that provides alternate content in the event Javascript or Flash is not installed and enabled. If you watch closely as the page loads, an image first appears, then as Flash is detected, the video player replaces the content. This is a more pristine approach to deploying Flash as opposed to the invalid code provided by Adobe/Macromedia.

The first video in the player above is a web version of one of Zarifa’s television commercials and aired locally on NBC and ABC networks in March and April of 2006, filmed, produced, and deployed by CreateSource.